Search This Blog

Can youth really save the planet?

We're always being told how the hope of the planet is our young people. The media bangs on to us aged folk that young people are much more aware of green issues, and won't make the same mistakes we did.

The most delicate term I can think of to describe this hypothesis is bullshit. (Good, organic stuff, bullshit.)

Have the people who spread this message ever seen a teenager? Amount of brain dedicated to self 100%. Amount of brain dedicated to the planet 0%. Just as one tiny example, every morning after my children go to school I have to go around the house turning off lights and electrical devices they've left on. Given the choice of walking, talking the bus or demanding a lift in a car they will go for the car every time. Time after time I have to retrieve recyclable materials they've just dumped in the bin. Of course it could be that my children are atypical teenagers - but I don't think so.

The reality is that we have been brainwashed by the media into thinking children are green. This is partly because we are always seeing a few token kids doing green things on the likes of Newsround and Blue Peter, and because schools (primary schools in particular) make a big thing of the green message, so the children will have done a project on recycling, and can spout the right message when interviewed for the TV news. 'Ah, they're the hope for the future,' simpers the newsreader.

No, they're not. Not without help. It's those of us with a good dose of middle age guilt who are most persuaded by the green message. If we really want youth to save the planet, we can't sit back and think 'They've got it, we're in safe hands.' We need to give them a loving shove in the right direction.

So Mr/Ms TV producer - next time you feel the urge to produce a piece showing how green the kids are, get real. For the planet's sake.

Comments

Completely agree, Brian. Cleaning up after kids is a constant battle against the dark forces of entropy. And don't you think 'bullshit' is a bit extreme? Try 'chickenshit'. Chickens are easier to keep in the average suburban garden than bulls, are less dangerous, produce eggs, and their shit makes an ideal compost accelerant. Now there's green.

But srsly, what strikes me about media types, as well as being gullible, as that they have such short memories (most being hardly more than kids themselves). Our parents' generation was a lot greener than we are. People drove their cars until they fell to bits, rather than buying new cars (especially not - gasp - those greenwashy Prius things). People walked more. People took their shopping home in trolley baskets or string bags. People think that plastic bags have been around for ever - but I am just old enough to remember their introduction, and the worries at the time about their (lack of) biodegradability. Whatever goes around, comes around.

At least on the western side of the Atlantic, the "green" messages in school also turn out to be thunderingly superficial. "Don't litter" is the heart of most primary-school environmental education -- even though dumping a ton of residential garbage in the woods doesn't "harm the planet" any more than so much "natural" decaying biomass from fallen leaves. It's an aesthetic issue.

The teachers don't want to bore the little dears with complex issues, but they do want to "do something about the environment," so they fall back on something simple with a vague application to the kids' own lives.

I believe your article was vain, pathetic and extremely insulting to the worlds youth. You say that were are all about ourselves. This is simply untrue. Our school has a recycling program, has fundraisers for a shcool were building in Zambia and we support numerous other causes. Just because the teens in your life are self absorbed (which to an extent we all are) that gives you absolutely no right to judge us all. You have no idea of the lives we live and how we are given pressure from all sides. And if you still are convinced that were a bunch of good for nothings, why don't you try to change that instead of insulting and degrading us.

And I must say, the adults of this world are doing no better environmentally than we are.

I am afraid I found the irony hard to find. We were all 'youth' once. I thought this ill thought out and insulting and the label 'irony' added post facto to excuse just being rude for rudeness sake. You are right of course that young people are not, by default, 'green', but then again, who is.

The irony is not in the behaviour of youth per se, it is in the naive way that the media represent youth. The fault is primarily in the media - only a small percentage of youth actually label themselves as green.

I really can't see where the rudeness is. Either you have no sense of humour, or you aren't old enough to appreciate what teenagers are really like.

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps.

Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think).

That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope? I…

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star, where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods.

In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is:Mediocre musicMelodramatic plotsAmateurishly hammy actingA forced and unpleasant singing styleRidiculously over-supported by public funds
I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some expansion. There is…

The budget airline Easyjet got a lot of publicity recently by announcing that it had formed a partnership with Wright Electric, a firm hoping to make electric airliners. But was this impressive forward thinking and environmental planning on behalf of Easyjet, or a lavish splash of greenwash?

There is a huge problem with making an electric airliner (as opposed to a very lightweight, short range, small electric plane). Kerosene - aviation fuel - is brilliant at packing in energy. Against a conventional lithium ion battery, kerosene stores away around 100 times as much energy per unit weight. So to replace, say, 50 tonnes of fuel would require 5,000 tonnes of batteries.
Don't get me wrong. Battery technology is improving all the time - and that ratio will get significantly better. But the 10 year timescale that Easyjet was talking about seems impossibly short to achieve that kind of improvement in energy density. It may be possible eventually, but we're talking a revolutionary t…